Calculating the cost savings of moving to the public cloud

We recently built a model for one of our customers — a medium-sized operator in the Asia Pacific — and determined they would save 60% on their TCO over three years.

When a communications service provider (CSP) evaluates a migration to the cloud, the IT department often approaches it as a “lift and shift” exercise. This means taking what they have, exactly as it’s deployed in their data centers, and deploying it as is onto Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS). The result: they conclude that it’s too expensive and not worth the effort.

This is the wrong approach. Instead, IT groups should consider cloud-native applications as ideal applications to move to the public cloud: applications that have been specifically designed to use and optimize the new cloud technologies. And that’s what we did at Optiva. We took our core OSS/BSS application and completely re-architected as cloud-native, so it could be deployed on the public cloud to reap the full advantages cloud has to offer. We call this REAL CLOUD.

Provision what you need, when you need it

A key differentiator — and benefit — of public cloud is the capability to auto-scale both compute and database resources. With elastic computing and database resources, you no longer need to pre-purchase and plan resources to handle 20-40% above peak capacity. You can provision for actual capacity, scaling up or down as needed, to adapt to dynamic business needs. The resulting cost savings is significant and is only made possible by moving to the public cloud.

With this move, you eliminate a myriad of costs — from the obvious (like reduced hardware, data center, and third-party software) to human resources (like reduced database management staff). And as another benefit, your IT staff can focus on delivering business requirements and less on dealing with managing and troubleshooting hardware.

Take a holistic approach to TCO

The direct cost of a BSS application — the license and support fees — is a small part of the overall expense. It’s the tip of the iceberg, and there is so much more below the surface. The components that comprise total cost of ownership (TCO) of managing and operating an on-premise BSS deployment quickly add up.

It starts with the cost of purchasing and installing hardware. Then there are the costs for hardware maintenance and support, which you replace three to five years later. Next, there is the software to run the application — from the operating system to the database management software. Add to that support costs or annual subscriptions and network costs (switches, load balancers, etc.). Last, look at data center costs — rent, maintenance personnel, electricity, security, administration, and overhead of managing the operation.

What does this look like in practice?

We recently built a model for one of our customers — a medium-sized operator in the Asia Pacific — and determined they would save 60% on their TCO over three years by moving their on-premise live and disaster recovery systems to Optiva Charging EngineTM on GCP.

In addition to these dramatic cost savings, the operator also identified the following benefits:

Better preparing your technology stack for initiatives, such as IoT and 5G

Modern hardware and data center infrastructure managed by Google, not you

No need to maintain disaster recovery

Introduction of autoscaling

Zero-downtime, streamlined upgrades

With a compelling business case like this, it became an easy decision for this operator, and we’re implementing their new solution now.

Let us build a TCO model for you

Running your own data center is old school … It’s 2019. Time for REAL CLOUD!And only Optiva can deliver cloud-native, core BSS on the public cloud for telcos.